The parliamentary dossier codenamed WAILING DAUGHTERS has attracted much—some would even say undue—attention in the years since the dismantling of the Duskstar Citadel. Analysts have cast aspersions on Planet Maker’s official report on the orbital’s activities, pointing out that no mere conventional weapons platform justified the fantastical R&D budget outlays during the “tertiary systems” design phase, but this skepticism underestimates both standard military extravagance and the scope of the paranoia which accompanied the Lesser Stillness. While admittedly the official parliamentary explanation that pages twenty-seven through thirty-two of the document were lost with a Document Retention Outprocessing Center destroyed during the Estyrian Confict is farfetched, nefarious intentions are only one of many explanations for a missing file-folder in the chaos of those times.

What remains of WAILING DAUGHTERS does raise some interesting possibilities; indeed, some have claimed it as the “missing link” explaining Planet Maker’s shift from habitat engineering to energy production. The extant records suggest that the citadel may have been designed as a stronghold proof against hypostatic ambiguity induced by artifacts such as the Ambivalence Drive, or perhaps as a projector capable of creating the same. The most star-addled theorists claim that the Citadel was in fact the speculative “Zeroth Generator”, constructed during the height of the panic, which laid the “groundwork”, as it were, for all of the projects to come.

—Heichner Kzolknov